tante

tante, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Sam Altman is back as OpenAI CEO with a new board.

And of course the new board was hand picked to no longer restrict Altman so he can run OpenAI as a business as he sees fit (until he jumps to one of his own things he's been preparing for months now).

The interesting aspect of this: The new board no longer has any women, the 2 women on the old board were replaced by Larry Summers who's known to think that women just have less "intrinsic aptitude" for "science and engineering". So Yeah. Says a lot about what OpenAI considers important.

tante, 1 year ago to random

Kinda tired of the whole "I made a lot of money building the Torment Nexus but now I quit and am warning you about the Torment Nexus (buy my book)" redemption arch for tech people we seem to have settled on.

tante, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

I fully switched to Firefox a few months ago when Google kept on pushing their "Manifest V3" Chrome policy, now that they continue to push it and remove V2 (and with it meaningful adblockers) from Chrome in 2024 maybe you want to start migrating as well?

https://developer.chrome.com/en/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/

Don't go to Brave btw. It's a shit company that keeps doing shady stuff and is run by a homophobe. There are so many browsers, just pick one. (Whether other Chromium-based browsers will keep an interface for effective customization for users around is for you to research. Just use Firefox TBH).

tante, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

Today in "LLMs can't do even simple reasoning":

Prompt: Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?

See a whole bunch of LLMs fail: https://benchmarks.llmonitor.com/sally

tante, 11 months ago to random

First it was: "Search is bad now, I'll just use Reddit to find answers.". Now Reddit is trying to kill itself while the search engines inject falsehood generators into their pipelines for weird reasons. Finding information is gonna get a lot harder.

tante, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

As someone in software for a while that has been the most surprising thing that Open Source did: It massively increased complexity even for small projects because "that's how Google/Amazon/etc do it".

Yes Amazon does Microservice architectures. They also have a few people for every service that knows the ins and outs. You have a team of 5 that now not only has to understand the problem but juggle dependency chains from here around the moon and back so your React App that should have been plain HTML doesn't fail while showing a basically static page.

You won't grow to Google/Amazon scale. It's fine. Just build a simple solution you can maintain.

Working on React/K8s or whatever is mostly you training yourself on your own dime and time to be a potential hire for some Big tech company that will fire you to juice the numbers at he end of the next quarter.

tante, 3 months ago to random

Study finds that Github Copilot lowers code quality and maintainability:

"We find disconcerting trends for maintainability. Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited."

The paper concludes: "How will Copilot transform what it means to be a developer? There's no question that, as AI has surged in popularity, we have entered an era where code lines are being added faster than ever before. The better question for 2024: who's on the hook to clean up the mess afterward?"

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2024/01/25/copilot-research.aspx

tante, 8 months ago to random

Giving Fairphone shit because while trying to build a long-term viable, sustainable and socially and economically fairer device they also think about the people in the real fucking world who are supposed to use them and offer them the software most of them rely on (like Google Apps) is more toxic purism than I can stand.

People who are willing to suffer in their life by using something different, something slightly incompatible to what the rest of the world uses already do install roms and run whatever on their machines.

Getting real actual people to buy a phone that's not built to be thrown away in a year of two, that highlights the values of sustainability is a huge win.

And making the medicine ("your phone might not be as fancy as your peers' phones") taste sweeter ("for 8 years you have access to all the applications you need for your life to function within a digital society") is just a smart move.

tante, 5 months ago to random

A match made in hell.

(For my international followers: Axel Springer is Germany's Fox News.)

tante, 3 months ago to random

"Most of the executives hoping to profit off AI are in a similar state of mind. All the free money right now is going to AI businesses. They know the best way to chase that money is to throw logic to the wind and promise the masses that if we just let this technology run roughshod over every field of human endeavor it’ll be worth it in the end.

This is rational for them, because they’ll make piles of money. But it is an irrational thing for us to let them do. Why would we want to put artists and illustrators out of a job? Why would we accept a world where it’s impossible to talk to a human when you have a problem, and you’re instead thrown to a churning swarm of chatbots? Why would we let Altman hoover up the world’s knowledge and resell it back to us?"

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/

(The framing of AI as a religious cult isn't a new phenomenon. I wrote about it in 2018: https://www.boundary2.org/2018/08/tante/ , AI has always been a religious movement)

tante, 2 months ago to random

"It turns out that generative AI companies don’t like it when you steal, sorry, scrape, images from them. Cue the world’s smallest violin."

In Moment of Unbelievable Irony, Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft

https://www.themarysue.com/midjourney-accuses-stability-ai-of-image-theft/

tante, 2 months ago to random

Holy shit, WordPress.com/Automattic is really trying to destroy all the goodwill it has built over years.

Selling user posts to "AI" companies is such a breach of trust and an insult. It negates any respect for user contribution that is the basis for a good and sustainable relationship.

https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/112004850884204466

tante, 6 months ago to random

This is the most absurd thing I have seen.

tante, 6 months ago to random

"Here's an AI to write Alt-Text for your images" is exactly what @danmcquillan argues is the "management of austerity" at the core of current "AI" systems: Marginalized (in this case blind) people get a shitty version of the real thing because we can't be bothered ("can't afford") to give the real thing.

Writing alt text is not some annoyance that you should automate half-assedly. Write the fucking description of you post an image. It's just part of what you do when posting a fucking image.

tante, 1 year ago to random

Dropbox is the next company firing a significant amount of people to pursue the magical dragon "AI". Dropbox. A service that people just want to store their files, sync properly and make them shareable.

Sure they need some bullshit generators. The whole tech sector is just brain worms these days.

tante, 8 months ago to random

We all know the "free software" vs. the corporate "open source" split. But if the last years showed something it is that only using "freedom" as a fundamental principle isn't doing enough, it's just too limited.

If we want our communities to build software for a "common good" we might need to start thinking about other fundamental values and reframe "FLOSS" into something more goal oriented.

We need to integrate ideas of inclusion and environmentalism, about harm reduction and overcoming internalized colonialism that have shaped so many projects and communities (including to a degree the fediverse).

"Freedom" always sounds good and useful but it's just not enough, it's not tangible enough, to open for being captured by right wing narratives.

tante, 5 months ago to random

If you want to understand the whole OpenAI thing, this article is super helpful because it explains that OpenAI is not a real research organization or tech company like the ones we know: It's a cult. It's basically Scientology 2.0.

Quote:
"The consequences are what you might expect when a crowd of bright but rather naive (and occasionally creepy) computer science and adjacent people try to re-invent theology from first principles, to model what human-created gods might do, and how they ought be constrained. They include the following, non-comprehensive list: all sorts of strange mental exercises, postulated superhuman entities benign and malign and how to think about them; the jumbling of parts from fan-fiction, computer science, home-brewed philosophy and ARGs to create grotesque and interesting intellectual chimeras; Nick Bostrom, and a crew of very well funded philosophers; Effective Altruism, whose fancier adherents often prefer not to acknowledge the approach’s somewhat disreputable origins."

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/look-at-scientology-to-understand

tante, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Holy shit. This from 65daysofstatics most recent Patreon post:

"Here is a major issue we are currently tussling with. Since we started work on Wreckage Systems, the notions of generative/procedural art and, in particular, 'A.I.' have become increasingly loaded terms. As we hopefully made clear in various posts over the last few years (this one comes to mind), we are deeply, deeply sceptical about A.I. and all the algorithmic and technological answers being carelessly thrown at what are actually political and structural problems in the name of progress/infinite growth/capitalism-is-fine-actually-and-will-save-us-from-climate-change-honest. 65LABS has picked a side, and it is Team Luddite. Against us, these tech bros are not only destroying the internet, not only devaluing art, not only making the already-precarious lives for creative workers even more precarious, not only failing to understand that the meaning and magic of art is not contained in its particular combination of pixels or samples but rather created in the ripples of social relations that any piece of art makes as it pushes its way into the world, not only are they failing to understand that making art is, at best, to clumsily capture a snapshot of something larger, a fragile, flawed, always-incomplete communication of intent from one/some humans to others, NOT ONLY ALL THAT, but also (and yes, admittedly more trivially), they have tarnished this curious little space of computer-based art that uses generative tools to make itself. Because they do not use these tools in the name of exploring liquid, impermanent art that flutters around a recognisable core but never achieves a single, fixed state. They are employing them solely to be able to dig faster to the bottom of lowest common denominator Generic Internet Content."

All of this.

Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/january-doom-96911179

tante, 22 days ago to random

Balaji Srinivasan is the spearhead of the new fascist movement establishing itself in Silicon Valley.

It's easy to dismiss him as a clown given how bad, inconsistent and dumb his ideas are but he's a clown with a lot of followers in tech who listen to his visions of "ethnic cleansing".

https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

tante, 6 months ago to random German

Kaufland ist echte digitale Avantgarde in Deutschland mit der Aktion "NFT Refresh" bei der man seine wertlosen NFTs gegen einen 10 EUR Einkaufsgutschein eintauschen kann.

Die NFTs werden dann auf der "Wall of Lame" ausgestellt. Endlich ein Usecase für NFTs ;)

https://fresh4trash.io/

tante, 10 months ago to random German

Die Schuldenbremse hat nur eine Funktion: Investitionen in soziales und Klima zu erschweren. "Wer soll das bezahlen?" gilt nie für Militär oder neoliberale Imaginaries wie Aktienrente und so Humbug. Dafür wird Geld gefunden. Weil man will.

Die Tatsache, dass Dinge hier nicht besser werden, ist keine Konsequenz aus "Geldmangel" oder so. Es ist politischer Wille bzw. der Mangel an Wille Dinge aktiv zu tun. Wir haben nicht zu wenig Geld. Uns sind Armut und kollabierendes Klima nur zu egal.

tante, 11 months ago to random

"AI" is a mechanism for turning VC money and research grants into AWS profits.

tante, 1 month ago to ai

Everyone probably already saw this but Amazon shutting down their "#AI" powered stores while admitting that they ran on hundreds of people watching video feeds in India is just chef's kiss

https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-abandons-ai-stores

tante, 2 months ago to random

Data is never "raw" or "unprocessed" or "neutral" or "objective". The decision to record a thing (and not others), the structures and data formats it's pressed into, the granularity and frequency of collection are already a curation and interpretation of the world.

A data set with unclear collectors, without a declaration of the original purpose and goals is basically unusable responsibly.

tante, 11 days ago to random

I applaud Apple for their new iPad ad: "We are a huge corporate machine that will crush anything you love in order to make a buck" is refreshingly honest.